Street roots., September 01, 2017, Page 5, Image 5

Street Roots
S e p te m b e r 1 -7 , 2 0 1 7
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Page 5
MINDFULNESS, from page 4
that ensues after gratification evaporates, and
a certain kind of illusion, that is to say, not fully
anticipating the evaporation of the gratification,
are built into us by natural selection. And this
particular thing - not really reckoning with the
impermanence of things, especially the
impermanence of gratification - was a central
theme in Buddhism from the beginning.
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E.G.:
What are some o f the ways that our
modern environm ent tricks our hunter-gatherer
m in d s?
R.W .: There are two problems: One is that
natural selection built suffering into people
that they will experience even in the kind of
environment they were designed for, like a
hunter-gatherer
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environment. The second
problem is that the modern
What: Book signing and
j environment can make
I things even worse.
For example, it’s natural
When: 7:30 p.m. Sept 15
! to feel anxiety about the
j safety of your children, or
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about what people think of
1005 W Burnside St, Portland
you. You would expect to
find a certain amount of
anxiety for that reason even
in a hunter-gatherer
environment. But in the modern environment
that natural selection had no way of
anticipating, you get whole new forms of
anxiety. Like dropping your child off at a day
care center where you don’t know anybody;
that’s something that doesn’t happen in the
environment that we were designed for. Or
having to give a presentation in front of people
you’ve never met before; that didn’t happen in
the environment we were designed for, so you
get whole new kinds of anxiety, and fortunately,
meditation is pretty good at dealing with
anxiety - at least it can be if you work at it. And
it can change your relationship to unpleasant
feelings in general.
I’ve had experiences where, if I start out by
just accepting an unpleasant feeling like anxiety
and experiencing it and examining it, ironically,
I wind up viewing it from a critical distance,
with a kind of detachment or non-attachment
that reduces or even eliminates the suffering it
causes me. And more broadly, mindfulness
meditation promises to let you examine your
feelings carefully and choose which ones you
want to be guided by, and since some of these
unpleasant feelings are not only unpleasant,
they actually blur our vision in a certain sense,
anxiety can sponsor crazy, apocalyptic
scenarios about what’s going to happen to you
. while public speaking or what’s going to
happen to your child in some situation. Given
that some of these feelings that make us suffer
also distort our vision, it only makes sense to
approach them with some skepticism
The Science
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meditator. I have a very limited attention span.
I don’t, by nature, have a ton of emotional
equilibrium. And that’s why, in my case, it took
a weeklong silent meditation retreat to really
make me appreciate meditation. A lot of people
can pick it up much easier than that, but for
me, the retreat convinced me it was worth
developing a daily practice. And it has ups and
downs. There are days you just feel you can’t
concentrate at all and you got nothing out of it,
but by and large, I find the day goes better
when I meditate and that the rewards are
sufficient to keep me doing it. I also find the
more time I find to do it each day, the better
things go and the fewer regrettable things I do.
E.G.: I
had an A h a ! moment while driving the
other day, and I thought o f yo u r road rage
explanation that you describe in yo u r book - how
evolutionary psychology created the road rage
phenomenon. Ju s t thinking about that really
helped me to let go o f the anger. I ’m having a
harder time letting go o f negative feelings when it
GO
P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F S IM O N & S C H U S T E R
and lessen their grip on us, and meditation can
help us do that.
E.G.: H ow
would you describe m indfulness
meditation to someone who is unfam iliar with it?
R.W .: It usually starts by focusing on
something like your breath. If all goes well, you
will stop your mind from wandering restlessly,
and it will allow you to start focusing on things.
What you then do is just observe, carefully,
things you might not normally notice, including
things inside your mind, like feelings, thoughts.
You basically heighten your awareness of the
elements of experience, and some of the most
important elements are parts of your mind.
But in principle, having attained this focus
and attained some equilibrium, you can also
focus on things like sounds with much more
clarity than usual. In fact, you can find beauty
in things that you normally might not.
When I meditate, sometimes the refrigerator
near me starts humming. Believe it or not, the
humming of a refrigerator can be a beautiful
thing, and you can notice things about it you
wouldn’t ordinarily notice. It turns out that the
hum actually consists of at least three different
noises that are independently varying and
together they can create a sound that can be
beautiful in a certain way.
E.G.:
One thing I think will probably resonate
with any reader who has ever dabbled in
meditation is the way you humorously and
honestly talk about your own failed attempts at
m aintaining focus during meditation. Is that
something that has gotten easier with practice, or
does it still happen to you now and again?
R.W .: Oh, I still have trouble. I consider
myself the opposite of a naturally good
comes to annoying people who I know. A n y tips
on how to do that with m indfulness?
R.W .: Natural selection designed us to have
this category of “enemy,” and once somebody
is in that “enemy” category, it’s hard for them
to get out because we are designed to evaluate
their behavior in ways that reinforce the enemy
label.
If they do something
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good, we tend to explain it
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away as some kind of ploy
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or some kind of showing
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off, but if they do
something bad, we say
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yeah - that is the real
f o r t i e r s t® g e t o a t b e c a u s e
th em em ergin g.
it
w e a re d e s ig n e d to
I think it helps for
e v a lu a te t h e ir b e h a v io r
starters to understand the
1» w a y s t h a t r e in f o r c e th e
cognitive bias that creates
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and sustains the enemy
category and to understand S a b e l Í B g O Í ©B©B!Í©S ÍS hi«
that our labeling of
ased in fa v o r of
enemies is biased in favor
selfishness/^
of selfishness.
ROBERT W R IG H T,
It’s not an objective
A U T H O R O F " W H Y B U D D H IS M
IS T R U E "
view. It’s not a
pronouncement of God’s
that this person deserves
your wrath. It’s a reaction you had while
pursuing your own agenda. Which isn’t to say
there aren’t people who have truly earned the
enemy label; it’s just to say that not everybody
has. That is step one, and then I think
meditation can help, but I think it can help
more if you first understand what I just said
about the very origins of the concept of enemy.
Now, there are specific types of meditation
designed to deal with this - one is called
loving-kindness meditation. I have never had
huge success with that, but everyday
mindfulness meditation does sometimes put
me in a frame of mind that allows me to think
of someone that I basically don’t like, and just
think about them in a more charitable way
- almost like their mother might think of
them - where I suddenly understand that
there are reasons that they behave in a
way that bothers me. You know how good
mothers are at explaining stuff like that -
“She didn’t get her nap” - and I find that
meditation can give me a little of that
perspective, but it’s a real challenge. This
stuff isn’t easy.
E.G.:
You started this journey with a
meditation retreat back in 2003, and since that
See MINDFULNESS, page 7
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